I love the way that people have taken my Knowledge Cafe or the World Cafe and adapted it in various ways for a specific business purpose. Then on the other hand, many people have quite independently developed their own conversational processes that work well for them in their own environment.

I recently received this email from an old friend Paul Hearn who works for the European Commission in Brussels and thought I would share with you his story.

Hi David,

I saw your blog post about "holding conversations rather than meetings" and it inspired this email.

I've held more than 80 Tuesday Conversation meetings in the European Commission over the past 4 years.
These are informal gatherings of staff (from the lowly secretary to the Director General) held over lunchtimes on Tuesdays.

I have listed some of the topics below - it is amazing what you can talk about in and around work! We've had around 2.000 attendees in total.

I invented the TC because there was nothing like it, and it was sorely needed.

I developed a methodology for this event based on the principles of Open Space

whoever come are the right people (we have had 1 person and up to 54, but the show still goes on)

must leave if you are not getting what you want (law of 2 feet)

I also developed some "guidelines for speakers", called TC spirit, which you might find amusing see below.

It is all work in progress and hangs together on a shoestring as I have no budget and no administrative support and I do it alongside my normal work ... but hey, who every got anything good for free? I certainly never got any recognition, but that is not why I did it :-)

A selection of recent topics

Science in Society: Ethics and new and emerging fields of science and technology

Supercomputing meets the cloud and the checkbook: The future of distributed computing infrastructures for Science in Europe?

Opportunities for Public Technology Procurement in the ICT-related sectors in Europe

20/20 Vision Lessons from 20 years in the Commission, and the challenges for the next 20 years

The Open Innovation Paradigm - What is it? And how important is it?

Open innovation strategies: Examples from two large-scale projects in Sweden

Cheers Paul

Credit: Paul Hearn, European Commission, Brussels

And here are Paul's guidelines:

Spirit of our Tuesday Conversation Meetings

preliminaries:

Powerpoint presentation only if absolutely necessary and in any case limited to 30 mins or so, so we can have a good conversation after for 60 mins

Generally we ask a lot of questions, and there is quite a lively debate. We also commonly interrupt speakers if we are not getting what we want.

As it is the lunch hour, people will be going in and out, sometimes arriving late and leaving early. Speakers should not see this as reflecting anyway on themselves or the presentation (participants are instructed to feel free to move around :-).

we try to capture the spirit of urgency:

we try to find out why we need to be discussing this topic? what is urgent? what has changed recently?

what is the opportunity? what are others doing around the world? what should we be doing?

would anyone be against such a strategy? if so, why?

we try to shoot from the hip:

Getting "off the record" with our speaker. It is very nice to know, for example, what our speaker really thinks, beyond any protocol or institutional viewpoint.

we look for personal views and anecdotes, not institutional views. We are more interested in "one (wo)man's dream" than in the official view of institution X or Y. We like to see personal passion.

we cut to the point

we are not particularly interested in introducing ideas at length, being exhaustive, crediting everyone involved, etc.

we are OK with slightly politically incorrect. We like to do some preliminaries like briefly introducing the speaker, context, but then we like to get to the meat of the discussion - what is this, and why does it matter, what is the vision here and do we share it?

we try to look forward, not back

we are interested in knowing what the opportunity is, what might change in Europe on in the world if we can realise a futuristic vision?

we like to be stimulated

- we like presentations that pose more questions than they answer, and we like speakers who can be provocative, polemical and lead a debate.

Based on these thoughts, speakers are asked not to see this as a "normal meeting" (whatever that is), but as an informal meeting of staff from across the institution that are taking time out over lunch to learn something which is perhaps new and may help them in their work...

Credit: Paul Hearn, European Commission, Brussels

None of this is difficult. Why not start some "Tuesday Conversations" in your own organisation.

Paul says "I have no budget and no administrative support and I do it alongside my normal work" but that did not stop him.

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